Stimulus attributes of reactivated memory: Alleviation of ontogenetic forgetting in rats is context specific
✍ Scribed by Rick Richardson; David C. Riccio; Michael McKenney
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1988
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 595 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0012-1630
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Numerous studies have shown that ontogenetic forgetting (infantile amensia) can be alleviated by a number of different types of reminder treatment. The present study extends the information about the alleviation of infantile amnesia by examining the "content" of the reactivated memory. Toward this purpose, one attribute of memory (environmental context) was examined in rats tested either shortly after training (preamnesic) or after 1-week retention interval. For the latter, a reactivation treatment was used to reverse infantile amnesia. At both intervals, a context shift resulted in impaired performance of a conditioned fear response. These findings demonstrate that environment context is an important component of the originally encoded memory as well as the reactivated amnestic memory. The implications of these results for both the reactivation of memory and general memory processes are discussed.
The value of conceptualizing memory as a collection of attributes (Spear, 1978;Underwood, 1969) has become increasingly clear. There is evidence that the representation of an episode can include information about the value of the CS, the UCS, and the context in which the learning occurred, as well as any CS-UCS association. Furthermore, these representations may change over a retention interval. For example, a number of operant conditioning studies have observed a flattening of the generalization gradient with delayed testing (Thomas & Burr, 1969;Thomas & Lopez, 1962;Thomas, Ost, & Thomas, 1960). Since response levels to the generalized test stimuli actually increase at the long retention intervals, the flatter gradients imply a loss of memory for the precise attributes of the training stimulus (cf. Riccio, Richardson, & Ebner, 1984).